Core Post #5 - Larcom

In this final week's set of readings, I found myself particularly interested in Parks' piece. It specifically had me thinking about the HBO-Discovery merger, specifically the following image that I did not think too deeply about at the time (although I did make a lot of jokes at its expense): 

I still maintain it's incredibly funny (what is a genredom??), but this graphic is actually a pretty good microcosm-case study of something Parks is talking about with regard to the shifting understanding of viewership: from "the passive feminized viewer of analog TV" to the "autonomous masculine browser." But beside the point, considering this piece was published in 2004, it also feels fairly prescient: the merging of television and online spaces is pretty par-for-the-course now, as streaming has become the main mode of TV consumption for a majority of people—and microcasting the main mode of delivering TV to its audiences. 

One of last week's readings, by Park, Kim, and Lee, discussed Netflix as a platform and its methods where it comes to its acquisition of specifically Korean dramas, which on the surface seems to broaden the reach of these shows but at the end of the day still pushes US imperialism and hegemony by preventing Korean TV companies from owning or airing their own shows. With streaming services going the same route as cable went in the 90s, I think it ties in neatly to the Parks reading: "At the moment when network television"—or online streaming, as the case may be—"could offer innovation in programming and representation, it has resorted to a self-protective discourse grounded in dominant ideologies ranging from masculine control over technology to the 'survival of the fittest' reality shows that commercially exploit and culturally recuperate heterosexual romance, surveillance, and militarism." 

Getting back to what I was hoping to say about HBO and Discovery and how both Parks' chapter and the Park-Kim-Lee paper is relevant: I think the internet, microcasting, time-shifting—all the things that Parks mentions—open up accessibility to television shows for nicher audiences, which in turn makes content for those niche audiences more lucrative to create. But capitalism ultimately ruins everything, and the issue arises when streaming services start competing for revenue and have to not only determine who their nichified audience is, but also what audience they want and value. I don't have access to whatever market data HBO may or may not have conducted to determine that HBO Max has a "male skew," relies on "appointment viewing," and is the "home of fandoms" versus Discovery+ (which would be its diametric opposite and court the "opposite" audience, I guess—and again I ask: what is a genredom?). But I would still hesitate to say that a vastly significant majority of HBO Max viewers—and especially the majority of fandom spaces—are men or male-centric spaces (I think Alex may have touched on this earlier in the semester in a post of hers that mentioned the Succession fandom and how it's largely populated by mentally ill, often queer young women and teenage girls). 

I don't even think it's necessarily that HBO is unaware of its own audience. Again, I don't have access to their market research, but I doubt they're completely in the dark as to who's watching their shows and who the loudest and most engaged fans are. It comes back to who their ideal constructed viewer is for a given type of show, and where they think the money is coming from. Discovery shows are "background noise" kinds of shows, oftentimes: documentaries rather than scripted programming, and not ones that require full and complete attention to understand or follow. You can check in and out of Discovery shows fairly regularly and not find yourself lost. Whereas the scripted and serialized HBO content does require a fair deal more dedicated attention. 

It takes me back to what Parks mentioned about the DEN: nichified content courting youth and counterculture/subculture markets. It feels like a lot of HBO Max's content reflects a similar ethos (we're telling bold and honest stories nobody else will tell), which makes its supposed understanding of its own audience all the more jarring. Not to be a total pessimist, but I think what it all comes back to is this: even the most supposedly progressive and interesting televisual storytelling is at the mercy of networks or streamers who only care about the money end of things, and even as accessibility of stories evolves and opens up, being at that mercy presents an injury to the medium that's very difficult to repair.